Alicja Kwade artist talk at Haus am Waldsee

On the occasion of her solo exhibition at Haus am Waldsee, 'Monolog as den 11ten Stock', Alicja Kwade will be giving a talk in conversation with Heike Catherina Mertens, Managing Director of Ernst Schering Foundation. The talk, which is open to all, will be moderated by Dr. Katja Blomberg, director HaW.

For more than a decade the artist Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Katowice/Poland) has probed questions of astrophysics and philosophy in her sculptural work. Employing simple means, she seeks to uncover several layers of reality: two branches stand in a corner. Various precious metals are stacked on the floor, like statistics blocks. Boulders and rocks flood into the exhibition space.But can nature produce two identical branches? Is the metal’s value today the same as it was yesterday? Kwade does not intend to deceive the viewer. Rather, she wants to reveal the illusions to which he is constantly subjected. How could something be certain and predictable in a universe which is dynamic and changeable down to its tiniest particle? And yet our current economic system rests on the promise of absolute certainty.

Advertising and media cannot know the future. Instead they create phoney certitudes, subtly exploiting people’s fears for the future for their own gain. Dealing with these topics by artistic means, Alicja Kwade illuminates, by way of analogies, current consumerist thinking and present-day mental frailties.

As part of the UNE series of exhibitions dedicated to the great contemporary female talents, the French Academy in Rome proposes an unprecedented dialogue between the Franco-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé and the German artist Katharina Grosse , curated by Chiara Parisi .

For the National Gallery in Prague, Grosse elaborates a large-scale, site specific painterly installation which radically redefines painting as a performative and architectural medium and responds to the Gallery's industrial space of the late 20s functionalist style.